News Blog

The Cleantech Forum that took place in Toronto this week had an interesting guest--Rand Waddoups, senior director of corporate strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart, who regaled the audience with a pretty interesting array of facts and figures on the retailer's green push, according to Cleantech's news site.

Wal-Mart started to revamp its practices and become more green two years ago. The campaign revolves around good public relations, but also cutting costs. When you managed millions of square feet of retail space, small changes add up.

Some of the results:

The company is saving $1 million a year on energy costs by removing light bulbs from employee coke machines.

Another $10 million a year got saved by more aggressively recycling cardboard and plastic. Overall, Wal-Mart thinks it can turn the 100 million tons of solid waste it produces a year into a profit center.

Another $2.6 million gets saved by putting low-lead LEDs in freezers instead of florescent bulbs. That swap alone cuts down 35 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

Fuel efficiency is up 15 percent in its 6,500 fleet of cars.

More on the link above.

Is your family burned out on Webkinz and Club Penguin? Are you ready for a new online "game" with a purpose?

The public radio producer American Public Media has launched an interactive game called Consumer Consequences that allows users to model their own ecological footprints. The game prompts users to describe their lifestyles in terms of house size, car travel, energy use, food and shopping consumption, and the mathematical model behind the game translates the information into an easy-to-understand visual summary.

The bottom-line result tells you how many "Earths" of natural resources it would take to sustain all 6.6 billion humans...if everyone lived like you.

... Read more

I heard an interesting debate the other day on the topic of cities and skyscrapers. In a nutshell, when it comes to cities and buildings, is taller greener or is smaller better? In other words, should environmentally minded people like or dislike skyscrapers?

The Taller Greeners:
• Building up, rather than out, combats urban sprawl, means more concentration of people, means better for mass transit which equals fewer cars and lower emissions.
• Building bigger means more opportunity to use technologies like distributed generation, advanced energy efficiency, lighting and monitoring, which typically are more economic in larger projects.

The Smaller Betters:
• Smaller means more sustainable buildings and lifestyle, more trees and green space.
• Smaller means more neighborhood connectivity for all of us.
• Taller often means more nonsustainable steel, and lots of AC load, which we could avoid with smaller buildings.
• Smaller means less concrete and steel, which are often associated with the increased temperatures in cities.

Perhaps some of the environmentally friendly buildings in progress in places like Dubai or New York can bridge the debate, and make skyscrapers ultra green and ultra cool.

What do you think?

In the interests of full disclosure, I am writing this blog from the second floor of a skyscraper in my office in downtown San Francisco, and because of the lack of good public transport access where I live, I have to drive in to work every day.

NowPublic emerged onto the Web proclaiming, "The news is Now Public." Two years later they've embraced the tagline "Crowd powered media" and managed to secure significant funding in the process. According to VentureBeat NowPublic has raised $10.6 million in capital from Rho Ventures and Rho Canada with additional capital from Brightspark and Working Opportunity Fund. VentureBeat reports:

Chief executive Leonard Brody said it was the largest first round funding for any citizen journalist site. OhmyNews, a site based in Korea but which is now international, raised $11 million in a second round of financing. OhmyNews is somewhat different, however, in that it hires journalists and pays them based on advertising revenue it gets to its site.

VentureBeat explains that NowPublic's business model involves licensing submitted content to news organizations such as Associated Press in a fashion similar to that of existing news agencies. Unlike OhmyNews, it appears that NowPublic's model does not provide any form of payment for its contributors.

If this is true, then NowPublic is essentially a news agency without any employees to pay. While such an arrangement obviously creates enviable profit margins, it is not liable to be sustainable and brings up significant ethical questions about their enterprise. While it was obviously impossible for NowPublic to pay its journalists during its infancy, they now have a revenue stream and they owe something to the people who made the site possible. If NowPublic sells a license for AP to use a contributor's material, then NowPublic should in turn provide that journalist with either a percentage of the money or at least a flat-fee for its commercial use.

Nobody's going to like this one. Liberals will feel attacked. Libertarians will nod glumly. Conservatives will feel they're being blamed for something that hasn't happened. And those who intend to ignore climate change will continue to accuse others of a conspiracy.

Peter Wells, a researcher in Cardiff, England, has published an article warning that climate change could lead to a global, militaristic totalitarian state. Here's where you can find the article, but it will cost money to see it all. So, a brief summary: Climate change will create severe challenges to numerous nations. It may prove impossible to get enough agreement among conflicting interests and countries to cope with the effects. Eventually, this may lead to more centralized, international government. That, the professor argues, is an open invitation to the military-environmental elite to gradually expand control.

Wells goes on to say, "A modern green junta is unlikely to arrive with tanks on the streets and the overnight capturing of control. Rather, it creeps upon us through multiple small steps--each one justified by 'necessity'." And Wells questions whether the slow-moving methods of democracy can cope with a global catastrophe.

Here's what his Web site says about the author: "Peter Wells has a degree in Geography from Leeds University, and an MSc in Town Planning from Cardiff University, while his PhD (also from Cardiff University) was on the subject of the socio-economic consequences of military R&D in the U.K. He joined the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at its inception in 1990 and has since specialised on economic, strategic and environmental aspects of the world automotive industry. He is particularly interested in small scale, decentralised economic organisation as a means to achieve sustainable consumption and production."

Of course, that's British spelling.